The Truth About Budget Plans
Ready for a behind the scenes look at how budget plans work- both for the customer and for the oil company?
Budget plans are an incredibly convenient way for you to plan ahead for your fuel costs. They offer a smaller monthly payment, instead of piling up all of your fuel costs into the winter months.
Right now you are probably paying for your fuel as you need it. You might be able to avoid a delivery over the summer months, get filled up in the fall, and then you buckle up and get ready for whatever rollercoaster of a winter we are going to have. You might as well put a blindfold on at this point too because who knows what prices are going to look like, how much fuel you will use, or how cold it's going to be.
For some people, they enjoy the riskiness, thrill, and unpredictability. For the rest of us normal people, we need to find a better way to plan.
Enter Budget Plans!
The purpose of these budget plans is to have a consistent monthly payment throughout the year. Check out this graph below that shows a visual representation of a real customer's fuel usage in Scarborough. This customer used roughly 850 gallons (which is around the average usage).
Let's break it down!!
Without a budget plan, this customer gets to take the summers off from paying for oil, but then BAM there's a $700 bill in September. That's gotta hurt the bank account coming out all at once. Then winter rolls around and there's five months of back to back brutal oil bills between $500-$600 a month. This all occurs during the most expensive months in Maine where all of our other utility bills, holiday costs, and other expenses go up, too.
Now let's look at what it would be like if they had a Budget Plan. For this customer, their budget payment would be around $275 a month. They'd start making payments in June and build up a little piggy bank to use so that when that September delivery comes around, they don't have to pay anything extra for the delivery-just their monthly payment. Their piggy bank continues to grow and during the winter months they aren't having to pay high amounts. This is especially clear in January where they paid about $600. However, with the plan they would have only paid about half of that by just paying their monthly payment!
The benefit of paying monthly will help you to plan ahead and have a game plan for the season. You'll also benefit from being on automatic delivery, and having your payments on auto pay. You can also check out another blog we have titled The Benefits of Automatic Delivery.
Now that we've discussed what the benefits are for you as the customer, I'm sure you're wondering what's in it for us?
There's not many oil companies that are transparent about these programs. We manage all of our programs internally, and work with our suppliers to get the best possible pricing for you. Our goal is to improve our efficiency so that we can lower operating costs and be able to give you better pricing, be able to help more customers, and continue to grow.
The enrollment period for Budget Plans is June to August. If you are interested in signing up, give us a call at (207) 571-4231 or click the button below to learn more or enroll!